If you’ve walked down Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, you’ve probably seen the vacant, rat-infested lot that sits between Amoeba and Rasputin Music. It’s been there for a quarter-century, and its history offers a lesson in the dynamics of city governments, as well as the effects of urban blight: plans to build low-income housing on the land have been repeatedly delayed, and its unsightliness is cited by many Telegraph merchants as an impediment to the struggling commercial district’s success.

Elsewhere in the East Bay, more flattened ground has popped up lately. In West Oakland, one improvised skate-park has already been demolished, and another is likely to be leveled in the coming days. The whole imbroglio highlights the challenges that arise in furnishing spaces for youth recreation. The parks were illegally built on land owned by Caltrans; supporters fought to preserve the spots, even enlisting the City of Emeryville, which attempted to lease one of the sites for use as a legitimate park. The effort failed: “If you go there now it doesn’t even look like it ever existed,” says Brian Fatemi, an Oakland skateboarder.

Without legitimate parks, skateboarders often resort to committing misdemeanors. If they’re lucky, instead of having to defend those charges in a regular court of law, they can be tried by their peers, at the McCullum Youth Court in Oakland. When minors are arrested, the Oakland police department decides if the case should be tried in youth court, where peers work together to decide what the consequences of a crime should be. Each sentencing has three components: the offender fulfills community service hours, attend workshops, and serve as a juror for future juvenile cases.

North of Alameda, Marin’s Buck Institute for Research on Aging is focused not on young people but on the elderly. It’s America’s first independent research facility that exclusively focuses on the connection between chronic disease and aging, and it recently added a new component to its campus, where researchers will examine why aging tissues fail to regenerate, and why the elderly’s stem cells stop functioning.

In San Francisco, a different group is trying to understand, and combat, another sort of death — that of print journalism and literature. Tonight, a panel will convene to discuss the future of journalism and literature in this increasingly digital age, considering what’s lost, and gained, in the move away from print. The panel features Oscar Villalon and Laura Cogan, editor of the literary journal Zyzzyva, as well as Nion McEvoy, CEO of Chronicle Books, and John Tayman, CEO of Byliner; it will be moderated by Jeanne Cartesen of the Bay Citizen.

A new Web interface allows San Franciscans to better understand their city’s budget. The tool, designed by California Common Sense, a group of Stanford students and alumni, takes budgetary data that would once have required considerable analysis and renders it easily understandable. The group plans to devise similar ‘transparency portals’ for every county in the state.

… And the Bay Area has two more official geniuses in its midst. William Seeley, a UCSF neuorologist who researches early onset dimensia, and Kay Ryan, a Pulitizer Prize-winning poet from Marin, are two winners of this year’s MacArthur “Genius” Awards. The prize offers financial support, ‘no strings attached,’ in the form of a $500,000 grant, which recipients receive over the course of five years.